Thermal dewetting of thin Au films deposited onto line-patterned substrates

Au films are deposited onto line-patterned substrates, and the dewetting of the line-shaped films is studied. The results show that the line-patterned substrates can clearly lead to both, a decrease and an increase in the resulting particle size and particle spacing when compared to dewetting occurring on a flat substrate. The size and the spacing of the dewetted Au particles scale with the feature size of the line-shaped films in a Rayleigh-like way, but this scaling law ceases when the ratio of line width to film thickness reaches or exceeds a critical value.